I knew I was being foolish, but the voice in my head assured me it would be fine. So, I removed the sausage roll from the oven, reasoning that at worst it had been there since the night before. It tasted a bit off, but tomato sauce nullified that. And all in all, it went down OK.
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I was feeling a bit queasy when my wife asked me, about an hour later, if I had eaten the sausage roll in the oven. She smirked when I said yes, before informing me that it was a week old. Smirking at my misfortune! What's that about? "She hates you, loser," replied the voice in my head.
"Really?"
"Sorry to say ... but yeah, she does."
For seven days, the sausage roll had decomposed in that small, dark space as the temperature hovered around 30 degrees. It was retaliating to the hostility of my stomach by attacking me with bursts of bacteria.
I was soon assaulted by a battery of aliments: contortionist stomach cramps, hydrogen-bomb headache, Exorcist spewing, fire-hose diarrhoea and napalm fever segueing into Kafkaesque delirium: I imagined that I had metamorphosed into a gigantic insect.
I was lying on my back, which was hard like Sam Newman's face. My brown belly was dome-shaped and divided into segments that were as firm as Eddie McGuire when he sings Good Old Collingwood Forever. My numerous legs were shockingly thin, like an Adam Goodes tormentor when he's six feet under.
"Oh, hurry up and die, will you."
"Wow, that's pretty harsh," I said.
"I was referring to you," the voice replied.
So there I was, transformed into a giant insect and I'm lying on my bed.
The wall-mounted flatscreen relayed a Test match between Australia and Pakistan at the MCG.
Shane Warne interviewed David Warner on the sun-punched ground. Warne asked Warner if his transformation was genuine. "In other words," Warne said, "is your good sportsmanship authentic and, consequently, more likely to be permanent?"
"Bloody oaf, mate," Warner said. "Absolutely."
At that moment, a biblical darkness descended on the ground and a lightning bolt was fired, leaving only a black smudge on the grass where Warner had stood.
I then sensed a presence in the room. I looked to the right and discovered that I had a second head - a belligerent-looking monstrosity. "What the f***'s goin' on, old man?" Nick Kyrgios sneered. "And where're my bitches at?"
"Nooooooooo!"
Mark Bode is an ACM journalist